Review by Mack Hassler
“One of those days Jesus went out to a mountainside to pray, and spent the night praying to God. When morning came, he called his disciples to him and chose twelve ofthem,whom he also designated apostles [special messengers]”
Luke 6:12-13
I particularly like reading nonfiction storytelling or memoir, and seem to recognize two distinct modes or types. The tidy storyline in the 75 pages is straightforward and clear, and seldom delves deeply into the mysteries of the transfiguration that Jesus cautions his disciples never to discuss when they come down from the Mountain after seeing Jesus, Elijah, and Moses bathed in light and raised up toward Heaven itself as though they were Angels. That story nearby in the New Testament is mysterious and close to magic.
Not so as Jesus tells another story at the start of Holy Week. The latter story seems equally magical. It is the story of the recruitment of the twelve apostles who will spread out to build the Church from the gradual beginnings of the Hebrews in Jerusalem to the wonderful voyages of Saint Paul after Paul’s mysterious conversion to apostleship. But Paul’s method of writing is always matter-of-fact, beginning with a salutation to the worker there before him and concerns about the Christians already present in the location.
Kathleen Johnson reads to me in the latter mode with nearly 70 short, matter-of-fact stories about her household, the everyday events of children, and the management of the house, somewhere in the Houghton-Hancock region of the Keeweenaw. She is “building her Church of “Yooper Parenting” with some of the Pauline concerns of detail and logistics. The few line drawings of Patricia Hicks, one of my favorites, are of an apparent six-year-old son in the family with a hopelessly untied tennis shoe waiting for some adult to cinch him up for school. Paul’s letters have no tennis shoes, but other details of everyday Christianity. I also think Kathleen Johnson’s prose is nearly as practical and useful as Saint Paul’s Greek. The overall effect is “practical Yooper living” some forty years ago.
Clearly, the individual Church communities that Saint Paul was doing so much to nurture as they were beginning to grow in the Faith did also change as nearly half a century led to more serious theological debates. We see a similar intellectual development in serious Yoopetness as well as in Memoir modes of writing. Recently, I reviewed a Memoir that contains near its conclusion the following generalization: The title of my review hints at the change in mode of storytelling–Ghosts of Fourth Street: My Family, A Death and the Hills of Duluth, by Laurie Hertzel
Here is what Hertzel writes near the end of her book:
“Those empty spaces we fill with stories; those spaces are where ghosts Live.” (both the sense of good Memoir writing as well as God’s sense [and Darwin’s] of a long history of the Church, as well as the evolutionary histoty of many extinct species, after Adam’s family had to leave the Garden) p. 154
Thus, the history of storytelling, or memoir, evolved into both the writing and the science of lost stories and stories of losses in the history of the Church. Kathleen Johnson writes a positive sort of tabulation. Memoir: At the other extreme is the mode of lost “ghosts” of death.
Kathleen Johnson has grown as a writer. I heard her at a special session of the UPPAA Spring Conference a number of years ago. This year, she will be a featured speaker on poetry at the May Conference. I think it was a good decision to reissue this book from 1992 again in time for the conference this year. It teaches us about Memoir writing as well as about the “Church of Yooper Parenting.” And it is fun to read.
Tales of a Keweenaw Mom: Adventures in Yooper Parenting, by Kathleen Carlton Johnson. Illustrated by Patricia Duke Hicks (1992, 2026 Modern History Press, Ann Arbor, MI 48105, distributed by Ingram Content Group) 75 pages, pbk, n.p.
